How powerful is the Librem 5, and how could I make games for it?

Trying to figure out all the terminology and specifications is daunting haha, Iā€™ll just test UE4 for the librem 5 when I finally get it and hope it works haha. I sent a mail to the Construct 3 team if they could clarify if their engine supported Wayland or not. For Unity wayland support has been in beta since 2017? So not sure if theyā€™re doing anything to improve that or put it into a stable build.

Is there a big difference in running a game in wayland or using htlm5/webgl or something else? Performance-wise?

Unfortunately, no. Before I do that I want to flash Debian to the board. Iā€™ve so far been only stumbling upon the documentation I need. Only yesterday evening did I find how to flash to the eMMC from an external computer. Progress is slow.

Well keep us posted! Iā€™m really curious about the power of the librem and the gpu :slight_smile: And how long it can retain certain levels of processing power if it gets too hot :o

Hey there, potential Librem 5 game developers! :grinning:
Purism partners with GDquest to develop adaptive game tutorials with Godot

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Would Purism prefer Godot over Unity/Unreal because Godot is open/free? Or does that not matter for games?

I prefer Godot for those reasons. And it ā€œjust worksā€. Last time I tried the Unity linux beta (for a non personal project) it was a disaster and unusable.

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Well Iā€™m busy trying to learn Godot, but I also want to see if Unreal works nicely with the librem. Guess weā€™ll see when it ships :stuck_out_tongue:

Iā€™m pretty curious if a mini2Dx project will work (and by extension Libgdx).
I recently got the lwjgl and libgdx native backends compiled on my raspberry pi so I think this would be possible too :thinking: that would be the best! (Iā€™m a java guy)

Hi Raggelen,

Im working on a html5 canvas game for the Librem5.
you can se my progress here:

and here:

My next game is going to be a 3d game.
I havent decided what platform to use yet. But my candidates are Godot or Html5/WebGL.

Unfortunately i only preordered the L5 and not the devkit, so im relying on some of the owners og the devkit to test my work :expressionless:

br Magnus

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Very late to the party and Iā€™m digging up an old thread, so my apologies in advance. Itā€™s difficult to compare one processor to another. How well your software is optimized for the processor is far now important.

Many here, I assume, are current desktop/laptop Linux users. The Linux kernel is an amazing piece of software. Current kernels can boot from a freaking USB stick on a 15 year old machine and provide a usable (letā€™s call it some light web browsing) experience. Hereā€™s looking at you LXDE/LXQt.
Sure, some are discouraged by the choice of hardware. Iā€™m not. C is an incredibly fast language and the Linux kernel does an excellent job exploiting that speed.

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Did you start with your next project? I want to do something for the Librem 5 in Godot, but I just a ā€œnewbieā€ on this.

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I have played around with Godot, but I havenā€™t figured if there is build support yet.

Has someone tested if the devkit has vulkan support? In case not (as I read somewhere that the current driver is the problem), how easy would it be for someone to install a propietary driver for that?

Would we only add a non-free to the sources of apt or install a deb or would it be even more fiddling?

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Ah seeing OpenTTD running on the DevKit is really cool, I love that old-school game!

The Librem 5 should run a lot of games. I had the FOSS RTS game 0 A.D. running on a Raspberry Pi 1B some years ago (only for a proof of concept, it wasnā€™t stable due to low RAM). I know we maintained unofficial support for ARM, and looks like weā€™re still packaged for Debian ARM. The codebase might need some OpenGL ES fixes and elsewhere, I doubt thatā€™s tested very often, but I do notice some recent posts on the forums.

Iā€™m curious how the devkit handles a GPU and RAM-intensive game like that. Anyhow when I get this phone and if nobody else has done so, I will at least get 0 A.D. working (might even consider UI alterations and optimizations).

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0 ad has only armhf as architecture, wouldnā€™t you need arm64?

I just saw that freeciv would probably also work (at least in a convergence mode) as there are packages for everything https://packages.debian.org/sid/freeciv

I think looking for packages is a good idea :smiley:

0 A.D. mostly supports arm64 / aarch64, but first we need to upgrade SpiderMonkey (the gameā€™s JavaScript engine) or someone could make a patch to fix the SM arm64 build in the meantime, since upgrades are very tedious.

If thatā€™s the only problem, itā€™s not a major obstacle.

According to the documentation, the i.MX 8M supports Vulkan and OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1, but the Etnaviv driver only supports OpenGL ES 2.0, so you will have to use the proprietary Linux driver for the i.MX 8M if you want Vulkan. However, I donā€™t have a Dev Kit to try this.

I agree, the big quesion would be - how would I install this propietary driver and is it compatible with the librem 5

You should be able to install the proprietary Vivante GPU driver on the Librem 5. Boundary Devicesā€™s Nitrogen8M board with an i.MX 8M Quad uses the Vivante GPU driver with a Linux/Wayland+Weston/GNOME stack, which is basically what the Librem 5 will be using.

However, building a game based on Vulkan will severely limit your audience, because I doubt very many people will want to play it on the Librem 5 if they have to install the proprietary Vivante driver. You can do a lot with OpenGL ES 2.0 in terms of gaming. Also, the Allwinner A64 in the PinePhone only supports OpenGL ES 2.0, and I expect that a lot more PinePhones will be sold than Librem 5ā€™s.

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